I'm one of the luckiest Arab actors on the planet, because I've done, I think, two of the finest Arab roles that have been out in mainstream cinema for a very long time.

You really expose yourself when you try and go to up the volume and up the size of your performance.

I wish everybody was just ethnically ambiguous. It would make life a lot easier.

Something most people don't know about me is that I never grew up.

You're not actually being a good actor all the time. But people refer to me as a good actor because they read it someplace, not because they've made up their own mind. So I'm very lucky!

You know, I find people with great honesty, bodily, physical honesty, who sit just the way they like to sit, and walk the way they like to walk, and don't come into a room all pumped up, I find them elegant.

I think the Arab world has no personality cult situation going on that they have in much of the Western world, South America included. They are a culture of words and religion, and you won't see manycsa charismatic people on Al Jazeera, except for the ones who are now learned presenters. You see Arab leaders getting on TV - which was very hard for me working out how to do the part, since Arab leaders are looking somnambulant, staring into their microphone, almost as if someone's got a hand up their back.